Just a thousand feet offshore from this beachside town lies what should be a wondrous underwater world of color and activity, a realm of angelfish, gobies and other aquatic beauties darting among sun-dappled reefs. But instead of a diver's delight, the area is an ecologist's lament.

Friday night, Peter Schickele took a break from presenting the inexcusable music of the ne'er-do-well P.D.Q. Bach at the Walt Disney Concert Hall to point out an oversight by The Times. I'm not sure how it happened, but we neglected to list a performance of an important John Adams opera. You know, it's the one about the 37th president who visits a famous porcelain factory that makes dinnerware with portraits of presidents.

Not many farmers wear a wetsuit to work. But Tom Ford isn't running your average farm. Instead of a tractor he drives a motorboat. And rather than chase away insects and rodents, he fights off prickly sea urchins.

There's a fundamental reason why houses of the future usually don't work: The visionaries don't live in the real world ("The House of Today, Tomorrow," by Nancy Rommelmann, Style, Jan. 9). For example, they are imagining a house without keys or knobs. Or they imagine window-less walls that are controlled by computers to become translucent, a giant TV, etc. That's fine, but what happens when El Nino or an earthquake hit in the future and cause a sustained power outage? How would you open cabinets or doors to access your emergency supplies?

Skiers, surfers and rafters take heart: Scientists say this winter will bring more snow, rain and bigger waves than the last few years. "It should be a good ski season, particularly in late winter," says Wayne Higgins, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist. A mild El Nino weather pattern building in the equatorial Pacific Ocean could shove warm water north from Central America, scientists say. Extra rain often results when warm water collides with cold fronts.

Sometime this afternoon, a tiny stretch of Camino Capistrano will reopen. And in a used-car lot a few hundred yards north, Ron Shearer and Dave Velton will be rejoicing. It's been more than five years since El Nino rains closed the two-lane link between Laguna Niguel and San Juan Capistrano; more than five years since the Capistrano Car Co. has had a customer cruise in from the south.

John Adams' "El Nino" recounts the Nativity story in texts old and new, many by Spanish female poets. It is a rapt, enchanting, profoundly moving oratorio that venerates the miracle of birth. A millennial work, it proved the perfect hopeful symbol of a new age dawning when it had its premiere in Paris at the end of 1999. In Paris, Peter Sellars staged "El Nino" as an opera, and he compromised his vision only slightly a month later for the American premiere by the San Francisco Symphony.

The El Nino that has helped bring unusual weather to parts of the country is weakening, federal climate experts said. El Nino is an unusual warming of parts of the equatorial Pacific Ocean. Since December, the excess warmth in the eastern equatorial Pacific has eased, the federal Climate Prediction Center said.

After a wet autumn, Ventura County basked in a January among the hottest and driest in recorded county history. But some forecasters still expect a stormy spring to push rainfall totals well above normal. Most of the county received no measurable rain in January, officials said Friday, and Ventura received just 0.02 of an inch from a coastal drizzle the morning of New Year's Day.